Blake Rayne’s approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, dissolve, and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition. Rather, they are shaped by always-evolving social, institutional, and physical relations.

Published in conjunction with Rayne’s first survey exhibition “Cabin of the Accused” (Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, October 22, 2016–March 18, 2017), Tense and Spaced Out spans Rayne’s work over the last decade, featuring long-form essays by Sean Paul, Jaleh Mansoor, Javier Sánchez Martínez, and John Kelsey, and shorter statements by Laura Owens and David Lewis. Not confined to the role of mere catalogue, however, the publication also includes documentation of the exhibition by a group of local high-school students and a magazine dedicated to Rayne’s 2013 book-object Almanac.